The Beginning of the End?

It looks like my work game may be coming to an enforced end. Nothing to do with the campaign itself, and indeed it's not certain yet. But there was a conversation yesterday that decidedly felt like the beginning of the end.

I'll keep you updated. I do hope I'm wrong though, given that this game is now effectively my only connection to the hobby, and I see little chance of that changing.

How to Mess With Players' Heads

One of the features of the domain of Lamordia is the presence of "weird science" - the influences are very much Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau. As a consequence of that, I've inserted various weird science elements into the setting - the university has a Tower of Astrology (rather than astronomy), there's a Guide of Ressurrectionists, one of my villains will be a rogue phrenologist, and so on and so forth.

Of course, as far as the inhabitants of the setting are concerned, all of this is just 'science'. Especially since, in the context of a fantasy realm, it all works (at least sort of).

Unfortunately, one of my players suffered some fairly serious congnitive dissonance at all of that - I think he wants his magic labelled as such, and therefore had some real difficulties with my description. I suspect invoking Arthur C. Clarke's third law (about "sufficiently advanced technology") is unlikely to actually help.

All of which is rather unfortunate. I don't think I have any solution to that - I'll just need to try to work around it as best I can.

Designing a Mystery - one thought, and one mistake

My first adventure for the new campaign is a mystery - a young woman has been attacked and maimed, and people want revenge. So far, so obvious.

My approach for designing a mystery is basically to draw up a bunch of nodes and lines - the nodes show all the likely vectors for investigation and the lines show where they point. I try to make sure that there are at least three lines pointing to any node I want the PCs to reach, in keeping with the "Three Clue Rule".

The consequence of this is that the web that describes the mystery looks awfully like the web of room connections I would make prior to drawing a proper map for a dungeon.

Which is the observation I would like to share: designing a mystery is basically the same as designing a dungeon. It's just that instead of exploring the rooms of a dungeon, the party are exploring the web of interactions between NPCs.

(I don't hold with the notion that the DM should only design half the mystery, on the grounds that the players will come up with a more compelling resolution anyway. Because they might well not do that, and end up meandering aimlessly through the setting instead. It's much easier to provide them with an enjoyable journey if you know the landmarks along the way.)

Anyway, that brings me to the flip side of this observation, and the mistake I've made in my first session. In a dungeon, you have a bunch of rooms, and in most (though not all) of those rooms you want something to happen - some sort of an encounter, a trap, and what-have-you. And perhaps some wandering encounters in the corridors between rooms, or something like that, but I digress.

What I'm saying is that in dungeon design it's a mistake to have too many empty rooms - rooms where the PCs search and just move on. When designing a mystery then, and more importantly when designing a mystery adventure it's a mistake to have too many nodes where nothing happens. If the PCs go back to the scene of the crime to see what they can find, it's probably a good idea for them to meet some resistance at that point - maybe a glimpse of the killer (and an exciting chase), maybe some hired thugs sent to dissuade them from their investigations... something.

And so, the first "real" session of the new campaign got off to an okay start, but not a great one. It was just filled with too many 'empty' nodes, and therefore not enough action. Fortunately, that's easy to remedy for next time.

I hope.

Racism in Ravenloft

Note: this post isn't about real-world racism at all, be it the hadling of different ethnicities, elements of the setting design that could be considered racist, or what-have-you.

Most of the best D&D published campaign settings originated in 2nd Edition days, and suffer from a weird disconnect - the settings tend to be written under the assumption that the vast majority of the PCs will be human, while the 2nd Edition rules made humans the least appealing character option. (The only advantage to a human PC was that you didn't suffer level limits - but level limits were very rarely reached and even more rarely enforced.)

From 3e onwards, the game has done a much better job of balancing the PC races, to the point where humans are a perfectly respectable choice. However, my experience has been that players will tend to go for something different for their PC - very often the more outlandish the better.

In the Ravenloft setting in particular, this is something of an issue, as the setting assumes that 99% of all NPCs are human and they have an almost xenophobic hatred of the different. Combine that with a largely non-human PC group, and you have issues. (In fact, my party in "The Mists of Lamordia" is entirely non-human.) And given that I really can't be bothered dealing with racism in my fantasy any more, that's just not something I want.

Fortunately, the solution to this one is pretty easy, especially in the domain of Lamordia - change it. Where it comes to Lamordia, the people are noted as being rational to a fault, so it's a simple matter to have them simply accept the different as it is, and move on.

That's not to say that the matter will be entirely absent. I have a story point related to the absence of elves, in particular, in the setting, which means that the presence of the elven PC will lead at least to some comment. Additionally, part of the tiefling's shtick is about them being outsiders and shunned by society. Since the player in question chose that race knowing that, I'm assuming that that's something that will want at least some mention (and, again, it's easy enough to incorporate into the story). But for the half-elves and the dragonborn (and, later, if we have any gnomes, dwarves, or halflings), it will simply be a non-issue.

All that said, I do kinda wish we had an all-human party for this one. But it wasn't to be - and I'd much rather my players choose characters that they'd like to play, rather than ending up with something they're unhappy with just to fit "my precious campaign".

The Second Map

After I finished my map of Lamordia, my attention immediately switched to the capital of that realm - the town of Ludendorf. That one took a bit less time, largely because I got halfway through and then decided I had to up the pace very significantly. But the most important consideration is: it will do.

Having completed those two maps to my liking, I'm now starting work in earnest on the campaign notes, which is much more familiar ground for me - I'm pretty good with simple writing tasks. It's just a shame that there's so much work and not enough time!

Looking forward, I'm now feeling much happier about my ability to produce good quality campaign maps for the future - they're a lot of work, and eat up a lot of time, and the results are obviously far from professional quality, but they'll do the job I'm looking for. Which is a nice place to be.